Work Text:
The Black Widow can be anyone. It's her skill, her gift, her greatest strength: she can look at a mark, see everything they don't think they're showing, and then become exactly what they want. And she's a different person to just about everyone she's ever met. Sometimes more than one different person.
Sometimes it takes a little while for those people to evaporate. Sometimes it's more than a little.
The first time he saw it in action - really saw it, the full deal instead of the made-on-the-fly stuff they both pulled out to get out of Russia - Clint found it creepy as fuck. When she came back from a mission where she played some kind of bright-eyed minx-secretary for the mark and there was a bounce in her step when she walked towards him, and when she kissed him on the cheek like this was something she did.
Like this was something Natalia Romanova would ever do, this cute little bubbly bouncy mwah.
It's lucky for him that his reaction to being caught out completely is to be completely impassive; lucky for him, too, that Natasha didn't quite know him well enough then to know that yet. Somehow he thinks that acting like she'd creeped him out in that moment would have done a lot of damage to the fragile things that stretched between them, back when that thing was fragile. Even if it wasn't for the reasons that she'd think, the reasons that would make her pull back.
Not about her, but about what people had done to take her there. That's a difference that's fucking hard to see from the inside, and Clint knows it. Always has. So he got lucky, that time.
He made sure he was ready for it the second time, and it didn't faze him.
The third time, she's willing to admit it happened. She's willing to think that it's something that maybe needs an explanation, which Clint finds incredibly touching.
Then she lists off names that she gave to some of the people she could most easily become - the names that she has for them in her head, because they can all take a thousand different names depending on the op - and tells him how to recognize them, more or less. The details change - whether it's the mother or the father that's absent, if she went to public school or private, if her major was physics or linguistics - but the centre of it stays.
There are about five, a handful, that come with an injunction that she makes in a brisk, uninflected voice, saying, "if I come back after being them and try to kiss you, don't take it."
There's a burning curiosity in Clint, one that desperately wants to know why, what it is about those masks that's different and what it would make him in Natasha's head if there was anything between him and one of them. If he responded to them, even just to let the moment go by.
But part of what they have is knowing when not to ask. She knows his tells, and he knows hers, and this one is covered with the tells of secrets she's not up for sharing.
So he just said, "Got it," and hasn't said anything else about it since.